‘Which one is he?’ Daniel asked, holding the frame up.
‘Moustache.’
‘Really?’ Daniel examined it more closely. Though the young man in the picture had a wider face than either he or his father had, he could nevertheless see a family resemblance now: the heaviness of the eyelids; the dimpled chin. Daniel had seen a photograph of his great-grandfather before – a formal portrait of him in uniform, but he hadn’t had a moustache in that one.
‘Taken the day before he was killed,’ Philip said.
Daniel looked at the date again. He knew his great-grandfather had died on the first day of a big battle, but he couldn’t remember which one. He wanted to say the Somme but that didn’t sound right. He read the caption again. ‘So the Battle of Ypres …’
‘The Third Battle of Ypres … They called it Passchendaele. That’s a line from a poem by Siegfried Sassoon. “I died in hell – (They called it Passchendaele).” ’ Philip picked up his glasses, slipped the cord over his head and tightened it. Next he reached for a slim volume of poetry, looked in the index, flicked to the relevant page and handed the opened book to his son.
Daniel gave the poem a cursory glance and clapped the book shut. Something about his father’s relentless seriousness always made him want to be flippant. ‘Passchendaele was the one with all the mud, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it began …’ He checked the date on the photograph again. ‘On the thirty-first of July?’
‘And lasted a hundred days.’
‘And we won it, right?’
If Philip was irritated by this comment, he chose not to show it. Instead he blinked slowly – an eagle’s blink – before taking the photograph from Daniel and turning his back on him, so that he could study it against the light from the window. ‘The British gained five miles of ground. Four months later they withdrew, leaving the ruins of Passchendaele to its ghosts. If it was a victory, it was a pyrrhic one.’
Daniel tried not to convey his annoyance at his father’s pomposity, but he couldn’t help himself, he was feeling annoyed. ‘So Andrew was one of the lions led by donkeys? Have I got that the right way round? Yeah, lions led by donkeys.’
Philip stiffened but affected not to hear. He put the photograph in a drawer, face down, and got to his knees again in front of the fire. There was a wheezy sound as he lined a set of bellows up against the grate and began pumping.
Daniel walked over, opened the drawer and took the photograph out again. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘Your aunt Hillary. We found it in her garage after the funeral, in a biscuit tin …’ Philip paused, momentarily lost in his thoughts, then shook his head. ‘It was with some other personal effects. They must have been sent back from Passchendaele after Andrew was reported missing in action. We haven’t had a chance to go through them properly yet. I’ll show you.’ There was a creaking of brogues as he stood up, walked to a cupboard and lifted a tin from another drawer. Though tarnished with rust, the word ‘shortbread’ was still discernible on its lid. ‘Look, here’s his hip flask, wallet, a lock of hair, some letters he wrote. And this …’ He handed Daniel a copy of Punch magazine that was covered in doodles. Handwritten in faded ink above its masthead was ‘Major P. Morris, 2/Rifle Brigade’.
‘Is this musical notation?’
‘There’s more of it inside. There’s also a music score tucked into the back.’
Daniel opened the back cover and a folded sheet of paper dropped out. When he smoothed it out on the desk he saw it had brown stains on it and was annotated in German. He read out loud: ‘Das Lied … Der Abschied … mit höchster Gewalt … This a passage from a symphony or something?’
‘I don’t know. There are two names at the bottom. Peter and Gustav.’
‘I could get Wetherby to look at it. He loves shit like this.’ Daniel cringed as the word came out. His father never swore.
‘That’s kind, but I’d rather hang on to these things for the moment. What’s interesting is the magazine. Look at the date on it.’
‘April the twentieth, nineteen eighteen.’
‘Nine months after Andrew was killed.’ Philip rested a hand on the fender as he got to his feet. ‘Some of this Major Morris’s personal effects must have been muddled up with Andrew’s.’
Detecting a faint smell of uric acid, Daniel looked at the crotch of his father’s moleskins. There was a small, dark patch. Feeling shocked that Philip hadn’t noticed – how long had this been going on? – he looked away, slipped the music score into the magazine and handed it back. ‘You wanted to talk to me about something, Dad.’
‘I do.’ He frowned for a moment. Nodded. ‘It’s about the tin. I wanted to ask your advice.’
‘This is a first.’ It sounded more sarcastic than Daniel intended.
‘I’ve glanced at Andrew’s letters but my French is not what it was.’
‘They’re in French?’
‘I thought Nancy might be able to translate them properly, if she’s not too busy …’ He reached into the tin again and picked up a bundle of thin, yellowing letters bound with hairy string.
‘Well, you could have asked her yourself, Dad. There was no need to call me in here like …’
His father looked at him.
‘Sure,’ Daniel said, backing down. ‘I’ll ask her to have a look at them.’
‘But only if you think we should.’
It was Daniel’s turn to frown. ‘Meaning?’
‘Sometimes it’s best not to disturb the past.’
‘Disturb? What are you getting at?’
Philip swallowed. His mouth groped for an answer. ‘I … I don’t know. My French is not … I think there was a reason your aunt Hillary never had them translated.’
‘How do you know she didn’t?’
‘She told me … When she was dying. She said there was a tin in the garage she wanted me to have. Said she had never read the letters. I feel …’ He searched for the right word. ‘I don’t know … Superstitious about them. Once opened. Once read …’ He repacked the wallet, hip flask, lock of hair and copy of Punch in the tin.
‘Dad, you worry too much.’ Daniel’s voice had softened. ‘You should definitely get the letters translated.’
‘So you don’t mind?’
‘Why should I mind?’
‘I have your agreement?’
Daniel’s brow puckered again. ‘Don’t get weird on me, Dad. Of course you … Do whatever you think best.’ He took the letters, slipped them into his jacket and, for a moment, panicked as he felt for the passports. Remembering he had put them in the glove compartment of the car, he said: ‘Anyway, we’d better shift. Thanks for looking after Martha and Kevin. I’ll ring from the airport. Tell you …’ He looked around and lowered his voice: ‘Tell you how it went.’
Kevin trotted in, followed by Martha licking her fingers as she finished a doughnut. When Philip saw her, he clapped his papery hands together and opened them slowly to inspect. ‘Missed,’ he said with mock gloominess. ‘Damn and blast.’
‘Missed what?’ Martha asked.
‘A fairy. Been having trouble with them. They make holes in my clothes.’
Martha laughed indulgently. ‘Fairies don’t exist, Grampy. You’re thinking of moths.’
‘Of course fairies exist. What’s this then?’ He reached in his pocket. Martha’s eyes widened and, despite herself, she walked over for a better look. Philip pulled out his pocket lining and showed Martha a hole in it. ‘See?’ he said.
Martha laughed again and punched her grandfather’s leg.
Daniel shook his head. How could the old bugger be so at ease with his granddaughter, yet so awkward with his own son? He headed back out into the hall and called through to Nancy, who was talking to Amanda in the kitchen. With her rheumy eyes, soft cheeks and reserved manner, Daniel’s stepmother gave the impression to strangers of being a passive and tolerant person. Nancy knew better. ‘Amanda was telling me that your cousin Thomas is
getting married,’ she said pointedly as she emerged from the kitchen. A thin smile was playing on Amanda’s granite lips.
‘Mum,’ Martha said. ‘Grampy was pretending that he had a fairy in his pocket, but I know there aren’t any fairies – Daniel told me.’
‘Call me Daddy.’
Martha took her father’s hand. ‘He told me at the same time he told me there is no God and no Father Christmas.’ Philip, Amanda and Nancy looked at Daniel accusingly.
‘What?’ Daniel said, pointing at himself. ‘What? … Well, there isn’t.’ He kissed Martha on the forehead. ‘Bye, darling. Keep Grampy out of trouble.’
‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ the nine-year-old said with a grin. This was a game of theirs.
‘Au revoir,’ Daniel said.
‘Arrivederci.’
‘Sayonara.’
‘Do svidaniya.’
‘We’ll be back in a couple of hours,’ Nancy interrupted.
The snow had turned to sleet. ‘¡Chao!,’ Daniel said in a stage whisper, pulling a guilty face as he turned his collar up, jogged to the car and opened the door. As he was reaching for his seat belt, arthritic knuckles rapped on the window. Daniel wound it down. Philip reached in and tucked a poppy into his son’s buttonhole. It was the one from his own jacket.
‘I have got one somewhere,’ Daniel said, feeling a mixture of annoyance and humiliation.
‘In case they don’t have any at the airport,’ Philip said.
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘And guess what DVD I’ve rented,’ Philip added in that slightly loud voice people use when talking to one person for the benefit of another.
‘Finding Nemo?’ Martha said from behind him.
‘Finding Nemo.’
‘Cool! Thanks, Grampy.’ Martha warmed her hands on the bonnet of the car. ‘Bye, Mum,’ she shouted. ‘Have a nice time.’ She clapped a hand over her mouth as she realized what she had said.
Nancy hadn’t noticed. She spent the short journey to Heathrow examining her nails. The windscreen wipers were on full speed. As the traffic slowed and thickened, Daniel wondered if he and Martha had left anything out of the packing they had done on Nancy’s behalf. He was sure he had packed everything they would need, yet still he felt edgy. Was it something he’d forgotten? Phone numbers? No, he’d left them. He hadn’t taken the pill he always took to counter his anxiety about flying. That must be it. He would take it once he had parked, once he had told Nancy what was really happening.
At Terminal 5, when he mounted the ramp marked DEPARTURES, Nancy waved her hands out in front of her, limp at the wrists, used her tongue to push out the flesh below her mouth and made a Nnnugh! sound.
‘Bugger,’ Daniel said, ‘we need to go to arrivals, don’t we?’ Nancy slapped her forehead in reply.
‘Do you think I can park in this disabled bay while you check what time their plane lands?’
‘Why not? I’m sure mental disability counts.’
Daniel pulled over to one side of the slipway and cut the engine. ‘The airline details are in the glove compartment.’
When the two passports fell out of the envelope, Nancy stared at them blankly. She pulled out two plane tickets to Quito and looked at Daniel with confusion in her eyes. Next came a small guidebook to the Galápagos Islands. She blinked and looked up at Daniel again. He was holding his iPhone up, pointing its camera lens at her. He was about to say ‘Happy anniversary,’ when he became distracted by a blue van parking ahead of them. The hitchhiker he had seen earlier was getting out of it, his shape blurred by the slush on the windscreen. The man waved his thanks and strode off towards the revolving entrance door of the terminal. The only sound was the soft percussion of icy rain on the roof of the car.
CHAPTER THREE
Ypres Salient. Last Monday of July, 1917
PRIVATE ANDREW KENNEDY CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY THE MEN marching ahead of him have stopped singing mid-song. There is something in the ditch – a carcass. Its lips are pulled back as if baring its teeth and its bloated belly is moving, making one of its hind legs shudder. It looks as if it is rising from the dead. As the soldier draws alongside he can see it is not the horse moving but the rats feeding inside it. One emerges from a leathery slit and stares impassively back at the column.
Half a mile farther on, the 11th Battalion, Shropshire Fusiliers, get their first sight of Dickebusch – ‘Dickie Bush’ – camp: smoke rising from dozens of fires, hundreds of tethered horses and mules, a long scaffold from which straw-filled sandbags dangle on ropes like executed prisoners, crates of chickens, a confusion of chugging, honking, backfiring trucks, motorbikes and staff cars, and soldiers – thousands and thousands of soldiers assembling for roll calls, eating from mess tins, arm-wrestling, digging latrines, dealing cards, shining boots, lying on their backs, playing leapfrog, writing letters, smoking pipes. As the column approaches, the noises and smells intensify. A small steam train clatters into a makeshift junction, followed by dozens of open cattle trucks packed with yet more troops. They look precarious as they jostle each other and hang over the sides. For the benefit of a newsreel cameraman whose hand is turning a crank at an unvarying pace, they cheer and raise their helmets. In the fields beyond them are row upon row of white, well-guyed bell-tents, arranged as symmetrically as gravestones in a military cemetery.
There are some tents waiting for the battalion, but not enough. Around a hundred men have to lie in the open, finding space wherever they can. Andrew and a few others from his platoon opt for a ruined barn. Despite their exhaustion from the march, sleep does not come easily. The pockmarked walls dance with faint colours: red and green flares being fired on the horizon. Also, they are sharing the barn with rats. Andrew feels, or imagines he feels, the straw moving beneath him.
Some members of the platoon regard the ubiquitous rats as companions in adversity, others as mere targets for bayonet practice. One private amused himself by baiting the end of his bayonet with a piece of bacon and shooting the first rat that came to eat it. But only one. He found himself on a charge for wasting ammunition. And bacon.
Andrew’s attitude is different. He is not so complacent. In the three weeks he has been away from England, he has developed a morbid loathing of rats. It is to do with the bluntness of their muzzles and the glassy lifelessness of their eyes. It is also to do with the way they move, either trotting with purpose in a straight line, their hindquarters and long tails raised, or scurrying for cover – fat shadows in his peripheral vision.
But in moments of self-awareness, the soldier recognizes his hatred is varnished with cold, premonitory fear. He has heard how the rats at the Front are quite unlike the beach rats at the Étaples ‘Bull Ring’. Here they grow to the size of footballs, bloated on the flesh of dead men. They usually go for the eyes first and then burrow their way right inside the corpse. When Andrew closes his eyes to sleep he can imagine the rank of rats heading with a steady, determined trot towards him, their coarse fur matted in the rain, their dark eyes fixing him, sizing him up.
He has encountered rats before. As a plumber in Market Drayton before the war he was sometimes obliged to inspect sewage pipes. But the rats he had seen then never bothered him. They were more frightened than he was, apart from anything else. And now, as he lies awake gazing at the stars through the rafters of the barn, the Market Drayton rats are a world away. When was he last in his home town? Five months? Five years? A lifetime ago. He recalls the day he and another young man from his firm, William Macintyre, answered Kitchener’s call for volunteers. As they cycled together to the recruiting office, a room in the town hall, they teased each other: about how one wouldn’t be able to shoot straight; about how the other wouldn’t know the difference between a stopcock and a Mills bomb. They were staggered to find a long queue of straw boaters and cloth caps snaking out of the hall and into the street. They parked their cycles and joined the end of it, playfully pushing each other out of the way.
Andrew allows himself a smile at this memory and turn
s his head to see Macintyre has managed to fall asleep. They have known each other since school. Took up their apprenticeships together, having both turned fourteen in the same week. The money wasn’t bad but they knew that plumbing was a temporary calling, a means to an end. Their joint aspiration was to form a music-hall double act. In their tea breaks at work, they had experimented with vaudeville songs and comedy turns.
In the semi-darkness, Andrew tries to remember some of their routines but they remain out of reach, his mind too numb to summon them. Instead he reaches across to find his friend’s hand. Macintyre grips it as a reflex without waking up. They had both found it funny when the medical officer had tapped their knees at the recruiting office. The memory prompts another smile. Although they had both recently turned twenty, the MO was suspicious they were under age. Andrew’s tendency to blink excessively when talking didn’t help, nor did his slight build and rounded shoulders. He nevertheless passed his examination and was issued with a uniform a size too big for him. Three months of basic training at Aldershot, followed by another two of hanging around the depot before his name appeared on a typed list outside the orderly room, had not given him an air of maturity, as it had certain other men. Even the ‘Ole Bill’ moustache he has since grown is too fine and pale to count as manly. As he lies in the dark, his head pillowed on his balled-up cape, he strokes his whiskers and tenses the sinews in his back whenever he feels, or imagines he feels, a movement beneath him.
It is still dark when reveille is sounded. Andrew has again not slept. He washes, shaves and eats his porridge in a trance before Colour Sergeant Major Davies, a thick-necked man with a dozen years of regular service to his name, orders the platoon to fall in. Though his nickname is the Creeping Barrage, on account of the way his voice starts quietly and builds to a roar, his voice this morning remains subdued and is all the more terrifying for this. He tells them what they have guessed, what they have feared and longed for at the same time, that they are going up the line in preparation for the Big Push – the breakout from the Ypres Salient that has been many months in the planning.
The Blasphemer Page 3